Path 2

Path 2

Piano-on-Sandbar Mystery Solved Too Soon

January 27, 2011

You know that piano that somebody left on a sandbar the other day? That was a huge mystery, and on CNN, and everybody was talking about it, briefly? Well, the mystery has been solved and, unfortunately, the resolution is somewhat less exciting than wondering about how a piano got on a sandbar. But it’s creative! The New York Times reports that 16-year-old Miami Shores high school student Nicholas Harrington decided he wanted to shoot a music video of the piano on the sandbar as a college entrance essay (which is kind of bad ass).

This piano has been through a lot. It was a prop in a long-forgotten film. It has been set on fire twice. It was “dropped by davits into a canal next to the Harringtons’ home, and set alight.” And it was ferried out to a sandbar via a 22-foot-fishing boat and left to rest there, for America to point and gawk and wonder.

The Harringtons came forward after independent filmmakers Billy and Anais Yaeger took credit for the stunt in the Miami New Times. Also via the New Times,

The teenager told Channel 10 News: “I liked the idea of an anonymous piano out there, no explanation to it. But another person came out with the idea that they did it. That’s just not right. But what people would do for publicity, who knows.”

Sadly, Harrington’s music video never happened, and now the mystery is over, too. As Nicholas’s mother said,

“I loved it being a mystery,” she told The Herald. “The allure was much more powerful than anything else.”